Pronouncing Roof Like Ruff

I now live in california and expected to hear it here after being questioned for years in the east.

Pronouncing roof like ruff. How to say roof. People who pronounce the wood roof as ruff are a danger to our society. The teacher also said we had only 12 instead of the normal 13 american vowel sounds pronouncing cot and caught the same but my question is whether my pronunciation of root and roof is disappearing. I am from the south.

Roof pronounced ruff roof as ruff is rare although i don t doubt that there are some who say it. Northern us accents tend toward the long foodish one southern accents tend toward the bookish one. The really bizarre one and not limited to michigan is the pronunciation of wash or washington as warsh and warshington. Mostly the distinction is between the two different double o pronunciations the long oo in food or the short oo in book.

When i was in grade school we had a teacher from chicago. And for nice try sake its called soda. The michigan ites and some other us americans i know pronounce roof as ruff. In a particular episode he says the difference is only caused by how some people make tense vowels as lax vowels.

Listen to the audio pronunciation in the cambridge english dictionary. According to grant barret linguist and cohost of the npr radio show way with words it is particularly a regional marker. How to pronounce roof.